


It wasn't Marilyn Monroe

by coffee_mage



Category: Ghostbusters (2016)
Genre: Academia, Gen, frank discussions of child genius, ladies in STEM
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-01
Updated: 2016-08-01
Packaged: 2018-07-28 14:50:55
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,535
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7645303
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/coffee_mage/pseuds/coffee_mage
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Erin has seen Holtzmann's genius first-hand.  Holtz could be working anywhere in the world without any problem, but she's not.  Erin wants to know why.</p>
            </blockquote>





	It wasn't Marilyn Monroe

“Hey Holtz, can I ask you something?” Erin asked, stretching.She’d been leaning over an enormous book for what felt to her spine like days.Being a Ghostbuster was not nearly as glamorous as it had seemed in the early days, when it had just been chasing down rumours with untested equipment.

Holtzmann’s head emerged from whatever it was she was building.“Sure.I should probably consume something liquid and non-diuretic.”Her hand popped out past her head and she started wriggling out. 

“I’m not sure if I should find it alarming that ‘non-toxic’ wasn’t on that list,” Erin said.

“Everything is toxic in a high enough concentration.”Holtzmann did something with her shoulders that looked like it should be painful, though she seemed unaffected, and she suddenly emerged from her cocoon, dropping to the floor.“If you want to talk, it’s fridge time.”She rolled to her feet and headed in that direction.

Erin stretched again and followed.“I was just wondering, why were you working in a diploma mill?”

Holtzmann turned and smiled widely, sticking her tongue out to lick where her philtrum met her lips before flicking it back inside.“You want the real reasons or a snappy quote for your autobiography?” she asked. 

“I’m not writing an autobiography,” Erin said quickly. 

“Nah, you’re taking notes for it in your diary.Which you shouldn’t leave on Kevin’s desk.Turns out, he does know how to read.”

Erin groaned.“Oh my god.”

“Don’t worry.He thought it was a takeout menu and only read it to us for two pages before he realized it wasn’t.But I know about your autobiography plans, so let me give you the snappy quote.‘Well-behaved women seldom make history.’”

“You’re going with a Marilyn Monroe quote for your answer?” Erin asked, a little disbelieving.

Holtzman rolled her eyes.“Laurel Thatcher Ulrich.”

“Who?”

“Pulitzer winning author who actually wrote that.No one remembers or knows who she is, so it’s especially perfect.”

“Oh.”

“It’s a good quote, though, and it’ll work well in whatever chapter you slot me into.I’m the bad girl, after all.”She winked at Erin flirtatiously.

“It doesn’t really explain how you ended up at a diploma mill, though.”

“What, you’d rather write a chapter about my tragic genius?” Holtzmann pulled a water bottle out of the fridge, tossed it at Erin, who surprised herself by catching it, then pressed a second water bottle to her forehead dramatically.“How misunderstood I am, how I could be doing anything and yet I was stuck in a basement with Abby when you found me?”

“Uh, well, that’s—“ Erin stammered, because that was almost exactly what she’d been thinking about writing to introduce Holtzmann in her autobiography.

“A great big load of bullshit.”Her tone was blunt and matter of fact as she twisted the bottle cap off.“I’m not a tragedy, Gilbert.I’m an aberration.There’s a difference.”She swigged back water, watching Erin’s face with wide eyes that might have been innocent if Erin hadn’t already had time to get to know her.

Erin blinked.“An aberration?Holtz, that’s… You shouldn’t think like that.You’re a genius, you’re funny, you’re—“

“An aberration.My brain is a deformity.”Holtzmann drank some more water, watching Erin’s face with an unblinking intensity.

“Genius isn’t a deformity.I know school must have been hard for you and it can’t have been easy, but there’s no reason to think of yourself like that.”

Holtzmann went from slightly amused to exasperated, an expression that she rarely displayed.“Let me be straight here—and let’s face it, I’m not very good at straight.Whatever you write about me in your life story, I’m not a ‘once in a lifetime mind’ or a ‘forgotten tragedy’ or any of the other Byronic shit you might come up with.If you want to go Byronic with me, stop by my apartment and I’ll show you the dark tragedy of what you’ve been missing out on while you moon over the great brainless Aussie.I’m just one of thousands of people out there with a particular deformity.Difference between me and most of ‘em is that I bothered living to grow up.”

“It was that bad?”

“Of course it was.I figured out how to take the hinges apart so I could get into the cleaning supplies in my mother’s kitchen when I was a year old.I made her cry every day until I went to college because I terrified her and I don’t blame her for that at all.I threw my first grade teacher’s chair out a window and jumped out after it because I was bored.You’re a smart woman.You know how this stuff works.”

“I’m not as smart as you.”

“After a certain measure of smart, it doesn’t matter who’s smarter.Your parents stuck you in therapy.My mother got lucky with my second grade teacher and they arranged to ship me off to college by the time I was ten.It’s the same thing.”

“They stuck me in therapy because I saw ghosts.”

Holtzmann rolled her eyes again.“They would’ve put you in therapy eventually no matter what.You’re a nervous wreck.”

“I think the therapy and social isolation were probably a pretty big part of that,” Erin responded. 

“Uh huh.And you think you wouldn’t have been socially isolated if you hadn’t been ghost girl?Gilbert, you’re a smart woman who isn’t prepared to stop being a smart woman.That means you were isolated from the moment you stepped into a school.The therapy was inevitable.”

Erin knew she had a little residual anxiety, but every kid, everywhere, got bullied at some point.Not all of them needed therapy.“Projecting much?”

“I was ten my freshman year of college.Of course I was isolated.There was never a chance I wasn’t going to be because I won’t play their games.I’ve never been satisfied to sit around and wait for someone to give me permission.I have better things to do with my time.”

“You were a little girl.Shouldn’t your mother have been helping you find friends your own age?”

The look Holtzmann gave her let Erin know she’d said exactly the wrong thing.“Oh, yeah, because a single mother who’s got to be checking in on her daughter all the time cause no one can handle her, she’s got time for that.”

“Your mom’s not like you?” Erin asked.

“Like me how?”

“You know.”Erin waved vaguely at Holtzmann’s head, not sure how to ask if Holtzmann’s mother was stupid without actually saying that.

“You mean is she an idiot?No, she’s not stupid.She just didn’t want an abortion when it came time to make her choice, so she dropped out of college.Couldn’t afford it with a kid.”Holtzmann shrugged, like it didn’t matter.

“She never went back?”

“Two jobs plus me.No time until the last couple years, but she finished her undergrad at light speed.”

“Why didn’t she look into scholarships?”

Holtzmann sighed loudly.“You’re pretty, but sometimes you’re about as bright as Kevin.I’m an _aberration_ , Gilbert.I was in the right second grade class at the right time.I got a free launch into what was supposed to be the crown jewel of my second grade teacher’s educational collection.I was already so sick of school I wanted to drop out and I was six and a half.I never would’ve even finished elementary school if they hadn’t let me have free reign of the library and test out of basically everything.I got one lucky break and it got me to RIT.Mom wasn’t lucky like that.Brains aren’t everything.Luck and the desire of humanity to exploit the weak is the basis of basically every transaction ever.”

Erin stared, not quite following.Yes, she knew people sucked.She’d known that for literally decades.But this was a line of dark, depressing conversation that she hadn’t ever expected out of Holtzmann.Everything seemed to just roll of Holtzmann’s back.

“Do you know why universities are willing to pay a ‘special residence advisor’ to literally babysit a ten year old engineering genius?”

“I guess I never thought about what was involved in sending a child to college…” Erin said weakly.

“It costs them a boatload.But that boatload buys them publicity.Good publicity. Good publicity gets them two boatloads of money. I was blonde, blue eyed.Curly haired.Tiny.I smiled a lot.They trotted me out at every damned donors’ luncheon there was.They showed me to the media.They only didn’t put me on Oprah because my mother refused to sign the slip.Every bit of my undergrad work was documented and shared with the public.They threw a fundraising luncheon for donors to celebrate my first paper.My first paper was probably only accepted into a journal because the journal noticed I was eleven.”

“Okay…”

“My mother was never going to get the princess treatment from a school and, honestly, she’s better off for it.Schools shouldn’t do that.They shouldn’t act like getting the youngest engineering student is an achievement, because it’s not.”

“No?”

“Being smart isn’t an achievement.Being smart is a deformity of the brain, an aberration, something that takes us above the median.It’s an accident of birth.You know what my mother said when Mrs. Schuyler asked her if she was proud of having such a smart daughter?”

Erin shook her head, because she had a feeling it wasn’t ‘yes’ and she couldn’t imagine how the answer would be anything _but_ yes.Holtzmann wasn’t just smart.She was a genius.She was everything a parent could ever ask for.

“She said ‘Ma’am, I understand, but Jilly being smart isn’t something she’s done.I’d be proud of her if she could stop getting in trouble for ten minutes and pretend she was like everyone else.That would be something that would challenge her, but instead I’m at another parent-teacher meeting.’”

“That’s _awful_ ,” Erin said.Holtzmann’s mother sounded like a monster.No one should say that about a child, especially not where that child could hear it.

“It’s not awful.It’s _true_.Learning came to me as easy as breathing.We don’t pat Kevin on the back for remembering to inhale and exhale, do we?No, we pat him on the back when he figures out how to use the phone, because that’s hard for him.Being a person, playing those games, that was hard for me.That was something I couldn’t do easy as breathing because I didn’t know how to pretend to be Kevin.”

“You never had to pretend to be Kevin.”

“Yes, Gilbert, I did.”

“No.”

“You asked me why I worked at a diploma mill.The answer is that I have zero desire to be Kevin.”

“That doesn’t even make sense.”

“Doesn’t it?You know how the tenure game works because you almost got there.You play nice.You keep your hair tied back, your skirts exactly to the right length.You make sure no one ever sees you write anything that they think is weird.You don’t go too far with your research in case you overshadow a man, because when you overshadow a man, he’s not going to want to promote you and everyone in charge of promotions is a man.You don’t hold back too far on your research or they’ll overlook you.You live hand to mouth as an adjunct and you hope like hell that they don’t lay you off in favour of hiring another adjunct just before you get to the point where tenure’s a possibility, but you know, deep inside, that your hopes are worthless, because it’s going to happen.

“You’re pretty, but not too pretty, because if you’re too pretty, they’ll accuse you of sleeping your way to the top.You’re smart, but not too smart.You’ve been there, you’ve done that.It was exhausting and it left you a wreck that was willing to seek out your high school best friend and yell at her just because of some stupid book.If a man had written that book as a high school thing, you can bet your favourite tiny bowtie that everyone would have had a good laugh and he would have ended up with tenure.”

“He might not have.”

“But he probably would have and you know it.”

Erin rolled her water bottle back and forth in her hands, watching the condensation stick to her fingers and change patterns rather than look at Holtzmann.“Yeah.I know.”

“I have a BSc from RIT and a PhD from MIT.You know what that CV means and it intimidates you, just a little.If I couldn’t find work anywhere but a diploma mill, you’re worried you’ll never have another lick of academic respect.”

Erin swallowed some water to try and fill the hard, dark pit in her stomach.It wasn’t that she needed respect to live, it was that she’d worked hard for it.She wanted it back.

“I had job offers everywhere.I could have worked anywhere, could have called people at virtually any institution worldwide and got a job.I tried Cornell on for size for my first post-doc.My mother was so proud because I dressed and acted SARA LEE.”

“Huh?Sara Lee?Like the cake mix?”

Holtzmann snorted and grinned.“Nah, it’s an acronym from a book I read.Teen romance thing.Similar and regular and like everyone else.Sara Lee.”

“And she was proud of you?”

“Yeah.I was doing something hard.And it was.It was really hard.It took so much energy and so much time.I was 19 years old and I’d never been on a date, never tried anything that wasn’t engineering.I was teaching a freshman physics class and over half of my students were older than me, but every single one of them was off-limits because of ethics.”

“You got lonely?”

“I was already lonely, Gilbert.That was old news.The real news of teaching that class was when I realized I had the biggest crush on this one girl that always sat in the front.She was gorgeous and I suddenly realized I wasn’t cut out to chase tenure.”

“Because of a crush?”

“A crush on a girl.I was still finishing up that delightful little roller coaster called puberty and she was my student and I’d never realized I was a lesbian before.”

Erin nodded slowly.“That sounds hard.”

“I missed class that week.I spent it literally up to my neck in a project.I got told off by my department chair.I’d never been told off by anyone before as long as I was producing work.I wanted to die.I called Mom and cried on the phone for the first time basically ever and she gave me the best advice.‘Jilly, finish out the year, pack your bags and leave.’”

“Your mother told you to quit your job because you liked women?”Erin’s estimation of the woman was not going up at all.

“No, she told me to go hide somewhere quiet until I grew up a little because I wasn’t ready.I told her it would be career suicide to go hang around at some shit little school and stay out of the spotlight.”

“Seriously.She doesn’t understand how academia works at all, does she?”

“No, she understands perfectly.She also understands me.She understood what I needed and she told me she was proud of me for trying so hard but that I was in the wrong element.I spent the rest of the year struggling to prove her wrong.I lost about twenty pounds.”Holtzmann looked down at herself.“Gained most of it back, thank Tesla.I was a skeleton and ladies like a little curve.”She wiggled her hips and winked.

“Still straight.”

“Still trying to recruit.Page one of the gay agenda.”Holtzmann smiled at Erin flirtatiously.“The other side of trying so hard to be SARA LEE?I couldn’t produce like I wanted to.It didn’t matter what the fuck I did, I couldn’t balance a serious courseload and still build.I need to build or my brain gets all clogged up.I can’t think, can’t eat.It’s a mess.I was a mess.I made it to the end of the year and quit.I worked in the private sector for about six months, but they want specific things and wouldn’t let me play.Then I tried a bunch of for profit diploma mills but Higgins was the only one that didn’t care at all about the illusion of being an actual school.If I didn’t show up to teach, no one cared after the first couple of weeks.”

“So you gave it up because you didn’t want to fight the homophobia?”

“I gave it up because work-life balance is a myth and I needed the right kind of work to survive.The work is my life and we’re very happy together, but I needed a divorce from the work they wanted me to do so I could live.”

“But with a couple more years, with your CV and credentials you could’ve gotten a research lab of your own, had more resources.”

Holtzmann looked her up and down.“That’s what you were hanging in for.”

Erin nodded.“Time would have given me freedom.”

“You know, I spent part of one of the years I was at a diploma mill going to high schools and trying to help get kids to graduate.Then I went to some elementary schools to talk to the trouble makers.I was supposed to be an inspiration, but I actually learned more from them than I was ever going to be able to teach them.And not in the meaningless teacher platitude way.I really mean that.”

“Then why did you quit?”

“I learned the only lesson I was going to and it was so depressing I couldn’t handle it.I’m built to be happy.”

“What’s that?”

Holtzmann caught Erin’s eyes and looked intently at her.“I’m an aberration.I’ve known that since I learned the meaning of the word.My brain is a deformity.And every school, every single one that I went to, there were a dozen kids with the same deformity.To be fair, they were big schools, but kids like me?We’re common.We’re everywhere.And most of us don’t have a chance in the world.I saw kids doing drugs to make their brains shut up.I saw girls dropping out of school to have babies they didn’t want because they’d been so desperate for someone to love them.I saw teachers that gave up on kids because they weren’t cute little blonde girls or the teachers were so exhausted that they couldn’t help the kids.I saw kids get beat up for being too smart.I saw a girl whose father took her out of school because, in her culture, the most important thing in the world for her was to marry well and men didn’t want a wife that was smarter than them.I’m an aberration not because of my brain but because someone saw me as something to be exploited and then they did that.I was lucky enough that someone wanted to exploit me for money and fame.I’m the aberration because I survived and I could have done anything but doing anything was going to kill me because there’s only so much exploitation one person can take and it was never going to stop.I was going to have to play perfect for the rest of my life and I don’t look good in tweed.”

“You could have learned to balance it, if you’d tried.”

“I could have.It would have been a challenge, but I could have done it.I just didn’t want to.I had zero desire.I wanted to be free.And I am.”

Erin watched Holtzmann’s face.She took several long swigs of water, considered Holtzmann’s words.“You should write a book.”

“Nah, I’ll leave the words up to you and Abby.”Holtzmann grinned.“I’m too busy being badass to be a tragic hero.After all, wouldn’t it be nice if the proton packs would fit in a pocket?”

“Oh god yes.”

“I’ll get us there.”Holtzmann saluted her with her water bottle.“Gotta finish this storage unit, first, though.Good talk.Next time, bring something with grain alcohol and tiny umbrellas.Actually, just bring tiny umbrellas.”Holtzmann’s face went thoughtful.“A lot of tiny umbrellas.I need about a thousand.Do they have them on Amazon?”She shrugged to herself and made a beeline for her laptop.

Erin watched her go, considering her words.Holtzmann was, well, right.About a lot of the things she had said, she was inarguably correct—Erin had experienced them.About others, well, Erin couldn’t be sure, but Holtzmann definitely had some strong points.One thing was for sure: Holtzmann was too happy in her life to be painted as a tragic genius in Erin’s autobiography.  She wasn't nearly well-behaved enough to fit an archetype.


End file.
